TrashCat
2009-04-22, 12:55 AM
So WOTC publishes all these nice books and "Ecology of ___" supplements that describe D&D's various races and peoples. But although these cover a lot of the big important stuff (politics, religion, history) it leaves to your imagination most of the minor everyday things that makes real cultures so rich. Think of all the stuff you'd leave out if you took a real-world culture and condensed it into an entry for the PH or MM.
This is a thread for all the little extra "facts" you've accumulated in your head through role-playing. I'm not looking for your house-ruled alternatives to official fluff, or for you to offer up entire histories/ societies you have made up (maybe a different thread). I'm just looking for random bits of detail that help give these races an extra layer of texture on top of the official fluff. I've only ever played 4E D&D, so that's the context I'm coming from, but you're welcome to offer examples inspired by other editions (just say which one).
In our campaign, I play a 4E wind genasi. Most of my examples from playing him came about by accident..... I didn't set out to invent random racial fluff, they just sort of occurred to me (often after the fact).
For instance.... from his backstory, my character was travelling with a couple other wind genasi before joining up with the party. These other genasi died of the plague (plague features pretty heavily in our setting), and I had a sentence about him going off to the highest hill in the area to bury them. It later occurred to me that cremation would probably be more aesthetically and spiritually pleasing than burial for a wind genasi. I quietly went back and swapped "buried" for "cremated." That got me thinking about how genasi conduct funerals in general. Fire genasi would also favor cremation, probably, and water genasi might do an over-the-waterfalls type thing like they did for Boromir in LOTR. Earth genasi would probably still prefer burial, though.
Similarly, the first night we made camp during the campaign, I assumed my character used a bedroll like everyone else. I've since decided that he sleeps in a camping hammock instead. In fact, he prefers hammocks to normal furniture in general, even if we're staying in a city.
The only time I've come up with one of these factoids on purpose was when I was brainstorming his background and family history. "Ecology of the Genasi" makes it sound like wind genasi are restless types who don't like to settle down. Which is fine if you're an adventurer, but most people aren't. What kind of day-job would such people gravitate towards? Once I thought about it, the answer was obvious. Sailor.
My last example isn't exactly a cultural quirk, but I'm including it anyway. I've decided that my wind genasi character is mildly claustrophobic. This should be fun when our party does the inevitable dungeon crawl. :smalltongue:
This is a thread for all the little extra "facts" you've accumulated in your head through role-playing. I'm not looking for your house-ruled alternatives to official fluff, or for you to offer up entire histories/ societies you have made up (maybe a different thread). I'm just looking for random bits of detail that help give these races an extra layer of texture on top of the official fluff. I've only ever played 4E D&D, so that's the context I'm coming from, but you're welcome to offer examples inspired by other editions (just say which one).
In our campaign, I play a 4E wind genasi. Most of my examples from playing him came about by accident..... I didn't set out to invent random racial fluff, they just sort of occurred to me (often after the fact).
For instance.... from his backstory, my character was travelling with a couple other wind genasi before joining up with the party. These other genasi died of the plague (plague features pretty heavily in our setting), and I had a sentence about him going off to the highest hill in the area to bury them. It later occurred to me that cremation would probably be more aesthetically and spiritually pleasing than burial for a wind genasi. I quietly went back and swapped "buried" for "cremated." That got me thinking about how genasi conduct funerals in general. Fire genasi would also favor cremation, probably, and water genasi might do an over-the-waterfalls type thing like they did for Boromir in LOTR. Earth genasi would probably still prefer burial, though.
Similarly, the first night we made camp during the campaign, I assumed my character used a bedroll like everyone else. I've since decided that he sleeps in a camping hammock instead. In fact, he prefers hammocks to normal furniture in general, even if we're staying in a city.
The only time I've come up with one of these factoids on purpose was when I was brainstorming his background and family history. "Ecology of the Genasi" makes it sound like wind genasi are restless types who don't like to settle down. Which is fine if you're an adventurer, but most people aren't. What kind of day-job would such people gravitate towards? Once I thought about it, the answer was obvious. Sailor.
My last example isn't exactly a cultural quirk, but I'm including it anyway. I've decided that my wind genasi character is mildly claustrophobic. This should be fun when our party does the inevitable dungeon crawl. :smalltongue: